Millican murder: McClenaghan to serve at least 16 years

Mr Justice Treacy told 52-year-old McClenaghan that while he would receive no remission on that term, his sentence will however date from the day he shot his former lover in the Portstewart laundrette she had worked for over a decade.

When first sentenced in September 2012, the original trial Judge Corinne Philpott QC, also imposed the same minimum term, telling the then 49-year-old father of two, it would be up to the Parole Commissioners to decide if and when he should be freed back into society.

McClenaghan, from Broad Street in Magherafelt, arrested within hours of the laundrette shooting on March 11, 2011, has now spent the last four years and nine months in jail.

Mrs Millican’s daughter, Suzanne Davis said the family were “very disappointed” in the sentence, as they left Belfast’s Laganside courthouse.

When originally sentenced in 2012, Ms Davis had also said that: “As a family we feel the sentence was very lenient, especially for such a crime, such a violent crime, that has been committed.

“Sixteen years is definitely not enough.”

She had also described her murdered mother as being “the glue that kept us together and now she is not here.

“It’s the simple things in life that we miss about her as much as the milestones, every little, insignificant things and she’s not here.”